


three two one

by pensrcool



Category: Eleven Little Roosters (Web Series), Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 02:51:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9858794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pensrcool/pseuds/pensrcool
Summary: That piece of the Gavin I puzzle that never made sense, the one that gave Gavin III a prickling uncomfortableness every time he thought about it, the Michael piece, shifts. The prickling feels more like being stabbed.





	

**Author's Note:**

> took some liberties with canon. mostly with backstory, partly with the extent of ryan's role.

Contrary to shitty science fiction belief, clones weren’t psychically linked. Well. The Gavins weren’t psychically linked, but it was entirely possible that they were just outliers and medical fuckups in that regard. Granted, it’s not really something that ever comes up with Gavin III, what with his two carbon copies living thousands of miles away, but. It means if he wants to check up on them sometimes, he actually has to put forth some effort. And he does, every once in awhile. Less out of a connection, more out of something that’s half continuing the smug satisfaction of knowing he’s the coolest and most successful out of all of them, half having an excuse to look at his own face. But being smug and looking at himself can only excuse so much effort, especially when they’re not even his favorite Gavins (he’s his own favorite, as if there was any question). So he never really gets around to a phone call, but he does scroll through their tweets every once in awhile, which he feels is pretty much the same thing.

Gavin II-Irrelevant Gavin-is doing okay. Not as good as MI6 Gavin, of course, but not bad. He seems to be the second string Original Gavin/Other Gavin. They have the same friends, but Irrelevant Gavin only ever gets hung out with when the other is out of town. They both have a job at the same company, but even there Irrelevant Gavin is second tier, doing odd jobs and labor, relegated to offscreen. Out of sight, out of mind. 

He only gives Irrelevant Gavin’s profile a cursory glance before moving on.

Other Gavin is doing better than Irrelevant Gavin-which is still nowhere near better than a job as an assassin, Gavin notes, with no small amount of satisfaction. His hair is different from Gavin’s own, more tousled and flyaway than flat around his face, and Gavin begrudgingly admits to himself that he may be onto something and thinks about cutting his the same way. And-there’s another thing, besides Other Gavin’s different hair and different job, another different puzzle piece that Gavin finds. It’s Michael.

Michael Jones has curly hair he's always wearing a beanie over, the fashion sense of a fourteen year old boy who just discovered graphic tees exist, and glasses that also look like they belong to a fourteen year old. He’s sort of cute and Gavin would _probably_ sleep with him given the chance, but that doesn't count for much. He’s not impressed. Other Gavin, though. That's an entirely different story. 

That Gavin tweets about Michael and Michael tweets about Gavin. Gavin and Michael met on Valentine's Day, and one of them points this out every year. Michael calls Gavin awful but fun to hang out with. Michael asks Gavin to come home when he's out of town, and when he’s in town, Gavin is with Michael _a lot_. 

Gavin hasn't seen Other Gavin in years, since they were both barely twenty and Other Gavin decided he wanted to go to America and Irrelevant Gavin tagged along. They haven’t seen each other at all since, adjusted very quickly to no contact after being Gavin, Gavin, and Gavin.

(Three. Interchangeable, inescapable. Gavin had always hated it. The way he was part of a set he’d never asked to be in, the way no one knew which one he was or cared enough to learn to differentiate between all three of them. A Gavin was a Gavin was a Gavin, and Gavin had never been more relieved than when the two other ones left the country, allowing him to just be Gavin for the first time in his life.) 

Other Gavin hadn't been like this, back then. Friendly. All three of them had had the same mannerisms, the same hair, and the same selfishness that arose mostly because of how little empathy they held for anyone who wasn't themselves. It’s not like they were anywhere near something as drastic as serial killer level non-empathetic; they rested comfortably at shithead level and never rose any further. They never purposefully hurt people, it was just that they couldn't figure out why they were supposed to care when someone who wasn’t them got hurt. It didn't impact them, ergo, they didn't give a shit. Because of that, their friendships were pretty sparse. They'd all been fine with that, okay with the casual type of relationships they became familiar with. Okay with how their closest relationships weren't close at all and mostly took place in bars of various dinginess and obscurity. It worked for them, and none of them ever felt some gaping hole in their chest from all the intimacy they didn't experience. 

That’s not Other Gavin anymore. He has friends. Like, real friends he talks to more than once a week when they group up to go out. Like friends he cares about. Like… Michael. 

Gavin knows what friends look like, in theory. He understands the concept of people whose company is enjoyable enough to elicit caring in a way that's not fleeting and based on your own convenience. He gets it, it just doesn't really work for him. So while he's fairly certain that's what this is, that this is what a version of Gavin with friends does and says and looks like, he hesitates before stamping off on that. It’s just… it’s weird. It makes him slightly uncomfortable, looking at them together, like he’s an intruder. Which doesn’t make sense, because they’re the ones who post the damn things in the first place, have no problem projecting these things out so people see them. But Gavin still gets a ripple of secondhand embarrassment when he sees them. It’s something about how close they stand, he thinks. That, or the way they smile around each other. It’s-it’s definitely something, and Gavin prefers not to think about it too long, or even decisively slap the label of friends on it.

\---

Michael and Gavin (and Gavin) die. And so do half a dozen other people. It’s very sad, probably, but Gavin’s mostly thinking about how he’s won the title of best clone simply by surviving. He stops thinking about Other Gavin and Michael. He keeps living his life. He cycles through an absurd number of handlers who state he's impossible to work with and he gets put on probation roughly the same amount of times. He sleeps with Annersby whenever he needs to get reinstated, and then other times just because. And then he gets paired with Mikey. 

Mikey doesn't have an inside voice. Mikey tells Gavin he hopes he breaks his face and that he's an ungrateful shit. Mikey saves Gavin’s life and is entirely useless in almost equal frequency. Mikey, Gavin learns, has been shuffled around to different agents for being volatile almost as often as Gavin has been shuffled around to different handlers for being Gavin. It shocks everyone when they don't spectacularly crash and burn in the first hour of working together, and it continues to shock people that they manage to border on something resembling competence. Mikey never becomes anything more than a voice inside Gavin’s ear, never even meets Gavin, but he's pretty good at being just a handler. 

Mikey’s the one who tells him about the mole. Or, more accurately, Mikey’s the one who asks if he read his briefing, spends a moment screaming when it's apparent he hasn't, and then summarizes things. The mole is killing people and that's bad. Very bad for Gavin who's going to end up as a victim at some point or another if the mole doesn't get caught, slightly bad for Mikey because of the increased scrutiny he's under and how annoying it is. So. Mole is bad, mole is getting other people to do their dirty work for them, dirty work is knocking out every organization to deactivate all other weird watches so their own weird watch activates like, a lot of power. That's the impression Gavin gets, anyway. 

And then there's the other component, the freelancer who’s inserting himself into the organization to find the mole out of the goodness of his heart, or something. Or because of his commission rate that somebody’s paying. He's spying on spies and hiding in plain sight by not hiding at all. Like, at all. Gavin walked past him the last time he was at headquarters but didn't recognize him or give enough of a shit to wonder _why_ he didn't recognize him, but Mikey pings him a photo, and yeah, that's the guy who was standing around and writing furiously on a notepad when Gavin saw him. And, interestingly enough, he happens to be the Stage Five Survivor. Gavin’s slightly interested after he finds that out, tells himself he’ll try to run into Haywood the next time they're both at headquarters. 

\---

“Are you kidding me? There's _another_ one?”

Gavin smirks, leans against the wall in a way that's meant to look appealing and cool. He'd run into Haywood completely on accident, but later he’ll assert that it was entirely on purpose. 

“I'm the last one, now. The best one. I'm with MI6. Sort of a big bloody deal around here.”

Haywood looks incredulous. 

“It's just my luck that _two of you_ could die and I’d still manage to run into you.”

Well. That's rude. Gavin’s smirk slips a little bit before it’s back in place, and he looks just as composed as before. 

“Dunno what you've heard-”

“What I've heard? What I've _heard_? I’ve heard you fucking prying into my personal life and going “Okay Ryan, a million dollars, but-” and you _shrieking_ every five minutes like it's as necessary as breathing and then all the “Oh, Michael, my boi, it's my lovely little Michael, Michael, are you paying attention to me, Michael, d’you want to go out this weekend and get drunk, Michael, I love you, Michael-”

Ryan continues ranting about Gavin’s clones, but Gavin stops listening. He frowns. It's just. Did the Other Gavin really say that? It didn't sound like him. Well. It didn't sound like Gavin, the MI6 agent. And as close as Other Gavin had seemed to get to people, Gavin had never been entirely convinced of the sincerity of that because they spent twenty damn years being exactly the same and Gavin doesn’t love people, not really. He’s picked up on the fact that he’s different like that, that regular people have things they care deeply for, and that most of the time, other people are some of those things. And he’s tried to understand, he really has, but he just doesn’t get it. 

He remembers, with vague annoyance, how Annersby wanted to do _things_ with him, wanted to have dinner or see a film or have a conversation where Gavin didn’t say something wrong. And Gavin had asked why, or said no, or said Annersby’s hair looked bad, and Annersby’s face and voice would do this...thing that Gavin never cared enough to look into, and he would leave.

Gavin tunes back in to Haywood, who has moved on to angrily gesticulating-something. Gavin’s not sure what, and he doesn’t think Haywood knows, either. He stops paying attention again and thinks about what he knows about Other Gavin. 

He remembers photos of him and Michael side by side, grinning. He remembers pictures at a restaurant, arms touching, drinks in hand, crowded around a table with a couple of other friends. He remembers passing comments about watching the latest overhyped action movie together, and how little regard either of them seemed to pay to all of this, like all of those things are normal. Haywood’s imitation, pitched higher and in the realm of Cockney (at a stretch) loops in his head. _Michael, my boi, my lovely little Michael, Michael, I love you, Michael-_

Arms touching. Gavin grinning at Michael while Michael looks at the camera. Dozens of little things, looks and touches and words. They might have said they loved each other. They might have-Hell, maybe Other Gavin got knocked in the head and gained emotions and they actually loved each other. It seems possible. He can hear the words in his own voice, words he's never said, directed at this boy he's never met who he only knows through photos. Other Gavin saying I love you, Michael grinning and laughing-what did his laugh sound like? How well did Other Gavin know it? He feels-not sick, exactly, but off kilter. Jerky. He’s having to pivot everything he knows about Other Gavin around this new axis of Michael. The floor is shifting under his feet but he has to keep walking. He tries to switch his attention back to Haywood again, but he's off track by this point. muttering something about… cows? It's weird. Gavin takes it as his cue to leave. 

Later, he wonders if there’s something wrong with him-just him, not Other Gavin or Irrelevant Gavin. He looks fine-looks _great_ , actually-but he wonders about whether some part of his brain didn’t develop as well as it should have. Maybe his nutrients were off. Maybe things just started copying wrong the third time. Maybe there are things he’s supposed to feel that the other two Gavins and the rest of the world actually did.

Haywood- _Ryan_ -avoids him after that for whatever reason, and Gavin almost refuses to seek him out because that has the potential to turn into a lot of effort. But he’s curious, and curiosity had the cat asking around for Ryan until he finds him. Gavin ends up cornering him in the employee lounge while he's pulling a Diet Coke out the fridge. 

“You were in that massacre, yeah?” 

Ryan’s not facing him yet, still leaned over in the fridge, but now there's a stiffness to his shoulders that wasn't there before Gavin spoke. 

Both he and Gavin know the answer to that.

He straightens up but doesn't turn around yet, closes the fridge door and faces it while he pops the lid. 

“Are you trying to talk to me about my _feelings_?”

He's derisive, bordering on mocking, and Gavin wonders for a moment which one of them had done actual research on him and had actual empathy-the only combination that would mean someone had approached Ryan about this before. Was it Moose? It was probably Moose. 

Gavin just snorts. 

“No. I don't give a shit about your feelings. I just-want to know some things. About me.” 

Ryan narrows his eyes, and Gavin edges towards apprehensive. He doesn't have anyone else to ask, if he pisses Ryan off. He's the only damn survivor, after all. 

“I have no idea if your clones fucked each other. The end.”

And that's not what Gavin was going to ask, not at all, but now it's a line of questioning he's interested in and will definitely come back to later if he remembers. 

“How did they die?” He asks, instead of denying he definitely wants to know more details about what they may or may not gotten up to. 

“Messily.”

Ryan facing him at this point, looking at him over the top of his can, and definitely not continuing that story. But Gavin keeps staring at him, gestures for him to go on with harried impatient hands, and finally, he sighs. 

“Mouse traps. Like, a shit ton of mousetraps. Enough mousetraps to kill two people.”

Gavin considers that for a moment, is quietly disgusted at how many bits the other two Gavins probably ended up as. Ryan’s still talking. 

“I think they just ended up scraping you into a trash can. I don't think you had a funeral, and if you did, I didn't go. Geoff was kind of tore up-not that you know who that is.”

“Were they the first ones to kick it?”

Ryan glares at him. 

“You know there's a file over all this, right? A file you don't have to ambush when it’s getting something to drink?”

Gavin shrugs that off and asks again. 

“Was it them? Did they die first?”

Ryan’s quiet for a moment, probably considering telling Gavin to fuck off, but doesn't say anything. Not fuck off, not “Here's the entire timeline of events of Austin’s Stage Five Massacre”. He takes a long drink before meeting Gavin’s eyes. 

“No. They were definitely around for the first death-one of them crawled on top of Michael while he died. I thought one or both of them killed him for about thirty seconds, that there was trouble in paradise so they decided to murder him. You know, that the whole display of concern was just that-a display to throw people off. I used to watch a whole lot of cop shows. First suspect’s always the husband or the mistress.”

“What do you mean, the husband or the mistress?”

Ryan looks at him like he's an idiot, which isn't fair. It's a valid question. 

“It means I had serious thoughts about your clones or Lindsay being the killer. The two Gavins I knew and Michael were always weirdly close. Like, homoerotically close. A little less so after he got married and one of the yous started dating Meg, but it was still pretty weird. And then Meg died and you all swung right back to full blown flirting and touching and shit. I always figured the two or three of you were banging, I just didn't know if it was behind Lindsay’s back or in front of her.”

That's. Hm. 

“They didn't kill him, though. They ended up dead too.” 

“Sure did. It was Barbara-the whole thing was Barbara, who was an evil asshole with a _serious_ God complex. Gavin holding Michael while he died wasn't him trying to throw suspicion off, it was just him panicking because Michael was-well, dying.”

That puzzle piece of Other Gavin that never made sense, the one that gave Gavin a prickling uncomfortableness every time he thought about it, the Michael piece, shifts. The prickling feels more like being stabbed. He doesn’t-He doesn’t want to think about Other Gavin and Michael anymore. He doesn’t want to deliberate on what they were or what they felt and what it means that Gavin’s never felt anything even remotely akin to that. Ryan gives him an odd look, and if either of them cared about each other even a fraction, he'd probably be asking what was up. But they don't, and Ryan drains his can and walks off while Gavin grapples with this new information that’s a confirmation of the suspicions he’s only half voiced to himself. 

But, he rationalizes, it doesn't matter. Clones are more like siblings, really. It doesn’t matter that they never treated each other as siblings, that they all viewed each other as different, shittier versions of themselves, or that other people regarded them as clones and not separate people. Being grown in a lab-that was just a technicality. They were just triplets. And if they were triplets, it was all developmental. Nature versus nurture. Just because they were all genetically identical didn’t mean _they_ were identical. Other Gavin’s weird caring thing (weird caring thing meaning having friends, enjoying having friends, and being in love with Michael) says absolutely nothing about Gavin himself. 

\---

The mole keeps killing people. Gavin keeps refusing to ever think about Other Gavin. Mikey continues to be angry at him. That's life. There are no more earth shattering revelations Gavin has about himself or his clones, but there are leads on the mole’s identity and target, courtesy of Ryan and Mikey and everyone who's still alive. It’s suggested that Gavin take the label of bait, and he’s eventually talked around to it. Mostly because he’s secure in the knowledge that everyone in the Rooster Corps plus a dozen or so members of hired armed security will be waiting in the wings, intervening as soon as things get even the slightest bit dicey. Hullum pats him on the back and tells him he's going to be a hero. Gavin can get behind that. 

\---

Gavin likes movies and the way that they’re life, if life had the kind of vibrancy that leaves spots in your vision. He likes how big they are, that it takes hundreds of people to make 90 minutes. He likes knowing that every second, every frame is carefully manufactured from the set down to the bracelet the actress wears and the light that hits it. 

Getting shot sort of looks like a movie, but it feels a lot different. 

He’s managed to never suffer more than a graze before, so this is… it’s intense, to say the least. His wounds tend to fall in the generic column, all stubbed toes and headaches and cricks in his neck from sleep. This hurts in a way that's sharp and all encompassing, in a way that gives him a visceral reminder every time his heart keeps pumping and he keeps bleeding. He’s dying, but he still has time to be annoyed at how the steadily growing red splotch has ruined his white suit. He tries to say something about it, but he’s not sure to who. It ends up not mattering because he gives up after the first word, too overwhelmed by everything to add forming sentences to his multitasking. Instead, he looks at himself. He appreciates how it looks. It's bright. Too bright, because of the contrast between red and white. Looking at it makes him dizzy. It’d make a damn good photo. 

He means to sit down on the ground because standing is… it's gotten a bit difficult, honestly, but he more stumbles and falls onto his back. This is a better way to go than mousetraps, at least. He dimly registers people flooding into the room, chasing the mole-what a bastard-and generally being a flurry of activity. No medics, he notices. Well. That's not good. 

His eyes are doing this new fluttering thing. There’s a hand on his wrist, and he looks up in surprise, and-What the _fuck._

It’s Michael. Other Gavin’s Michael is standing over him with a tweed Ripley pushed over his hair instead of a beanie, _yelling_ at Gavin.

 _I’m not him_ , he wants to say, communicate the futility of treating Gavin like the guy he knows, the one who Michael turned into someone different, someone who cared about things and had at least a few dozen shreds of empathy, who changed because of Michael’s plethora of admonishments about being an asshole. But then he thinks about it, and Michael’s more likely to save Other Gavin than MI6 Gavin, and he’d really like to not die. He can go along with this if it makes it more likely he makes it out. He frowns. How did Michael survive, anyway? It doesn’t matter, not really, not right now when Gavin’s a stranger and going to die, but it still bothers him.

He reaches up and grabs Michael’s hand, grins weakly at him. 

“Hi.”

Michael frowns and keeps yelling, something about how Gavin has, amazingly, managed to up his own incompetence by getting _shot_ and _dying_. 

And Gavin has time to be offended by that because he's _dying_ and Michael was supposed to be the person Other Gavin loved enough to say _I_ _love you_ to, not the person who yells at Gavin because someone else shot him. It's a bit unfair, he thinks, to be getting blamed for something he didn't do. He keeps listening to Michael, his string of insults, and then he frowns. Michael sounds strikingly British for someone who lived in Texas. Michael sounds like Mikey and really, what the hell. 

He's never really cared about Mikey, just like he's never really cared about anyone. Gavin hadn't even bothered to try to meet him, content with their only interactions being Mikey-bailing-him-out or Mikey-directing-him based. But surely it's not a coincidence that there was Michael-and-Gavin and now there's Mikey-and-Gavin, two identical pairs. 

(Two. Gavin and Mikey are a pair, even if Mikey doesn’t know it. Even if it’s something Gavin’s figuring out far too late. Even if they’re too distant and not what they’re supposed to be.)

Idly, he wonders if Irrelevant Gavin had his own Michael. Mike, maybe. Less idly, he wonders if maybe there nothing wrong with him at all. If it’s possible that his and Other Gavin’s and Irrelevant Gavin’s feelings were just Michael unlockable only. If the reason Other Gavin had fallen head over heels had less to do with him growing as a person and developing sentiment and all that other shit, and more to do with Michael’s presence gradually eroding him into less of a dick. And Other Gavin. He’d made it all the way to… something, and Gavin hadn’t. Gavin had gotten stuck somewhere in the coworker/acquaintance stage with his Michael and, consequently, not changed a bit. This time, he actually does feel sick as his understanding of things (himself) shifts and changes, but he attributes most of that to how a damn bullet just went through him. 

Try as he might, he can’t brush off the possibility of loving Mikey as something ridiculous, not with the things Ryan said and all the messages and pictures Other Gavin posted. He's annoyed at the idea of caring about Mikey. He's annoyed he can't know for sure he wouldn’t have, and more annoyed that his gut feeling is that he would have. Mostly, he’s annoyed that he was always going to be a unit. That Gavin and Gavin and Gavin got traded off for Gavin and Mikey, and Gavin had no say in the matter. 

He startles out of his thoughts when Mikey touches him, putting pressure on his wound. It's a nice thing to do. Gavin's figured out it's ultimately useless at this point, but it's still nice. He gives a shaky thumbs up in lieu of thanking Mikey. He gets a scoff in return, in addition to angry muttering about having to save his ass all too often.

What the hell, Gavin will give him that one. Mikey’s kept him from dying time and time again (ignoring the times he did nothing), Mikey’s called him rides home when it’s two in the morning and he’s sitting on a sidewalk absolutely sloshed. Mikey’s done pretty alright, except for right now when he let Gavin get shot. But besides that. Mikey. Loud. Pretty alright. Possibly the only person in the world capable of being Gavin’s friend, even if Gavin never actually got around to testing that. Gavin would appreciate it if he stopped yelling, though. That would make his final moments nicer.

But it’s fine. He’s not caught in a bunch of mousetraps. He’s still winning. It’s fine. It’s fine. He tells himself it’s fine until he can’t think anymore, until the amount of blood on his suit is too absurd to be real and far too much for him to live through.

(One. Gavin's on his own.)


End file.
